One good thing about Christianity
is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have done unto you."
posted by Liz Coppock @ 11:15 AM
2 comments
A Compendium of Momisms
Are there things your mother "always said"? My children claim I do, and though at first I doubted it, this collection of my favorite opinions and beliefs is for the pudding of which they are the proof.
2 Comments:
Sometimes this one confuses me. What if the other person doesn't like what I like? Shouldn't it be "do unto others what they would like to have done to them?"
Yeah, but I think the real problem with the golden rule is its contra-positive: She did it to me, so I can do it to her.
See: 9/11
See: Israel
See: Nick Morrison and Liz Edmond's shitty relationship See: He hit me first!
See: eye for an eye
The golden rule's most coherent expression is in Kant's Categorical Imperative, which claims that to determine the morality of a given action, one must "generalize" that action, which is to say, imagine what would happen if everybody did it.
Is it OK to kiss my mother on the cheek? Well, what if everybody kissed their mother on the cheek? In some cultures, such a thing is totally abhorrent, so it must be that kissing my mother on the cheek is immoral!
Of course, that is a simplistic and unfair way of charachterizing kant, but it makes the same point as Mom's post. Not everybody wants the same thing, so an action can't be moral on its own grounds, its the infinitesimally specific context which counts.
Maybe the rule should be: do unto others just right.
Post a Comment
<< Home